Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (9 page)

When we’re caught in the behavioral strategy, we have little hope of clarifying our anger. This is especially true if our strategy entails blaming and self-justifying, with that accompanying sense of power in being right. If we can refrain from blaming, we can focus on the initial reaction itself. We first ask, “What are the believed thoughts?” Sometimes the believed thoughts are right on the surface; other times they may not be accessible. Either way, the next and most crucial step is to enter the physical experience of the emotion. Truly residing in our anger has the potential to take us down to the core fears that are often driving our surface reactions. Practicing this way repeatedly will enlarge the sense of spaciousness around our angry reactions. As we regard them less as “me,” we become less likely to get caught up in them.

For the last several years, I have been doing a practice I find highly effective in working with anger. One day a week I devote the entire day to practicing what I call “nonmanifestation of negative emotions.” From the moment I wake up until I go to sleep, I make a conscious effort not to express negative emotions, either externally or internally. This is not just another dictate designed to induce moral behavior. In fact, its effectiveness has nothing to do with that. The reason it’s so effective is that it allows me to see the root of anger itself. Because I’m attuned to not expressing the anger, the moment it begins to arise, awareness is likely to kick in. I can see that point at
which I would normally choose to believe my thoughts, fueling the expression of the anger. But I can also choose not to attach to the thought, which denies it solidity. I’m practicing not identifying with the notion of “me”—its wants, its judgments—but rather with a more spacious sense of the moment. This is where I can reside directly in the physical manifestations of the anger, in the “what” of anger itself. Sometimes the anger then quickly dissolves, leaving little residue.

For example, recently a policeman stopped me for sliding through a stop sign. I was immediately ready to defend myself with righteous indignation. I felt the heat rising and the adrenaline starting to flow. But I remembered that it was my day to practice not expressing negative emotions. Instantly I saw how I was about to defend my thoughts, my “self.” I also felt the layer of fear—fear of losing control. I experienced,
in my body
, what was transpiring, and chose to go the other way. When the policeman started writing up the ticket, I was actually able to be pleasant.

When we see clearly how anger arises simply because life is not fitting our little pictures, dropping the anger is not so difficult. What is difficult is that we want to be angry. But this one-day practice helps us realize what is possible. We can see how our anger comes from our unfulfilled pictures
and
from our wanting to justify the anger. We can also see that when anger arises, we don’t have to express it, nor do we have to justify it by defending the believed thoughts.

Sometimes we might have the thought that we must be angry to engage in life. We might think that certain situations require action and that unless we are angry, we won’t act. When we see what we think is clearly an injustice, isn’t our anger the catalyst for our actions to remedy the situation? If we weren’t angry, what would motivate us to create positive change?

From a practice point of view, anger is never justified, no
matter how righteous we may feel. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t act when the situation requires action. It means we can act without the negative aspect of our anger. As long as we fuel this negativity by believing in our thoughts, we impede ourselves from acting with clarity. As long as we are being run by the powerful negative energy of anger, we are closing our hearts tightly shut. In most cases we are still mainly in the grip of fear, in which we make life—whether in the guise of a person, a group, or an institution—the enemy. This roots us firmly in a narrow sense of “self.” When we justify our anger in this way, we have lost all sight of the bigger picture, of our basic connectedness.

Once, as the overseer on a large project, I was severely criticized for my work. Even though it was clear to me that objectively the criticism was not justified, it still triggered a strong emotional reaction. And even though I remembered to practice immediately, the negative energy of the anger was unrelenting. I tried the practice of saying “yes” to rejection, inviting the hurt and fear in, but my mind kept spinning off in blame and self-justification, protecting and defending my sense of “self.”

The second day I changed my practice, following the dictate “Absolutely no blame or justification.” I made this practice my god. I saw that unless I made a strong effort to cut the thinking, the anger would continue to be fueled by the believed thoughts. Over and over again the thoughts arose, wanting to justify my position. Over and over again I cut them off, returning to my physical sensations of heat and queasiness. As the day wore on, I was able to reside in the bodily experience for longer periods. It then became possible to invite the hurt, the rejection, the fear into my awareness, without slipping back into blame. I breathed the feelings directly into the heartspace, allowing them to penetrate my shell of protection.

By the end of the day, the negative energy of the anger was gone. However, there was still a situation to deal with that involved a lot of money and many practical considerations. But
without the negative aspect of the anger, I was clear and resolved on what needed to be done. Had I not worked so intensely with my own reaction, there is little doubt that a closed-hearted encounter would have ensued, to no one’s benefit. As it was, the resolution was quick and also quite genuine. There was a sense of coming together that seemed to include the bigger picture.

As we enter deeply into practicing with anger, we can develop a sense of spaciousness even in difficult situations. As awareness enlarges around that narrow sense of “me,” perhaps we can get a glimpse of what it means to transform our anger, redirecting the energy of anger into the strength of resoluteness, without the negative overlay. This resoluteness engages life with both action and a sense of clarity. Here our self-will—our wanting life to be a particular way—is transformed into strength of purpose and direction, with a clearer understanding of what our life is about. Perhaps in the process we can even begin to serve life rather than always wanting it to serve us. But as long as we are caught in the emotional negativity of anger, the kindness and compassion that we are—our naturally open heart—will not be accessible.

So notice your anger whenever it arises. Regard it as your path to awakening. See how it arises out of your unfulfilled pictures. Notice whether you stuff it or express it. If you express it, notice your flavor: do you express it internally through stewing, or do you put it out there, even in subtle ways? See whether you can identify your believed thoughts. Then bring yourself back to residing in the physical experience of anger itself. Be open to experiencing your core fears. Remember, you can do this only when you choose to stop blaming. Do you want to keep your heart closed in anger? Feel the pain of continuing to live in that way and let that disappointment penetrate your heart.

9

Practicing with Fear

M
UCH OF THE PRACTICE
life is about dealing with fear. Fear tells us to close down, not to go beyond the protective outer edge of our cocoon. But by giving in to fear, we make it more solid. We strengthen our cocoon, contracting and limiting our existence. Fear has us avoiding some terrible imagined outcome, yet the substitute life we experience by giving in to our fear is already a terrible outcome.

A good friend of mine, Eliot Fintushel, wrote a science fiction novel called
Please Don’t Hurt Me
, which features extraterrestrials. Whenever they greet each other, instead of saying “Hello,” they say, “Please don’t hurt me.” Isn’t this is an accurate description of the subliminal undercurrent of fear that runs our lives?

Considering how much fear we all have, it’s a wonder we’re not already experts on this subject. But fear is one of the most slippery realms in life and in practice. The list of what we’re afraid of is very long. Our most basic fears include the fear of disease, the fear of pain, the fear of losing control and being helpless, and the fear of the unknown. We may also fear the loss of loved ones and the loss of status and material security. In addition, we’re afraid of being criticized and of looking foolish. We’re afraid of death and maybe even more afraid of dying. The strongest fear of all may be the fear of fear itself.

There are many other fears that afflict us individually, depending on how our personality has developed. These
include the fear of intimacy, the fear of sex, the fear of confrontation, the fear of betrayal, the fear of loneliness, the fear of responsibility, and so on. The first stage of practicing with fear is to gradually become aware of how much fear there is in almost everything we do—the fear behind much of what we call kindness, the fear in our ambition, in our depression, and of course in our anger. We could even define anger as inexperienced fear.

Many of our personality strategies are motivated in one way or another by fear. But often we’re not aware that fear is playing a part in what we’re doing. Often fear is covered over with anger or contempt. Often we numb it out with activity or diversions. This certainly was the case for me when I was in high school and college. If someone had asked me then about fear, I might have said, “Well, I don’t really have much fear. Fear isn’t my problem.” In those days I loved to party, I loved to dance, and I loved to drink. My goal was to have a good time, and being quite popular, I thought I was very much on top of things. For some time afterward, I regarded this as my best period.

But several years ago, I had a telling insight into my early relationship with fear. As I was listening to an “oldie but goodie” from the early sixties, I had a nice, bittersweet feeling of nostalgia. But in the middle of this nostalgia, I felt an agitation in the pit of my stomach that I recognized as anxiety. I thought, “Why would I have anxiety remembering my ‘Golden Age,’ when everything was supposedly great?” Then I realized that I was remembering, on a cellular level just from hearing this song, something that had been happening within me all along: anxiety. This anxiety had probably been motivating me to frantically have fun and seek diversions. But I wasn’t really aware of it then.

Not until my early twenties did I start becoming aware of my fear. Also around that time I started practicing. I quickly moved to the second stage of practicing with fear, which is to try to get rid of it. Seeing my fears and how they were
constricting my life, I took the time-honored path of trying to eliminate them—to confront them, to struggle with them, to overcome them and become free. Such a noble and worthy enterprise! Yet because this approach is often the result of our typical upside-down way of thinking, the practice of confronting our fears in the hope of getting rid of them is usually limited and misdirected.

Since I didn’t know this then, I started doing one thing after another to work with my fears by conquering them. For example, I would go out on the street and beg for money, or I would go into stores and ask for food. To ask people for money or food was difficult for me because I saw myself as a well-bred, nice, responsible person who was very independent and would never ask anybody for anything. There was a lot of fear and intimidation around behaving in ways that challenged this self-image.

When I was twenty-five, I joined a Gurdjieff group in San Francisco, where I was assigned a task I would never have undertaken on my own: to make up a song and sing it on Fisherman’s Wharf. In the summertime on Fisherman’s Wharf, there are hundreds of tourists milling around, waiting to ride on the cable cars. My task was to sing for them. In other words, I was to purposefully make a fool of myself.

I was to sing the Bob Dylan–like song that I had made up in front of all those people and then ask for money by holding out my hat. I dressed up in a hippie outfit with a black derby hat. Not only was I not a hippie, I didn’t even like hippies. And I certainly didn’t want to be seen as one.

Even now I can remember standing there, petrified, trembling, thinking I was going to faint or throw up. But I sang the song because I had willpower and because I wanted to get rid of my fear. I didn’t want to be afraid; that was my motivation. So I sang my song and asked for money. Then, a little while later, I did it again. Each time I did this, it became easier. I realized I was beginning to enjoy doing it. I was having fun. What I didn’t realize is that I was just replacing one conditioned self with
another. I had replaced this fearful self with one who was now confident in this situation. Nor did I see that through this practice I was not really working with the roots of fear; I was working with the content of fear. When you’re working with fear by trying to get rid of it, the content of fear can be endless.

But at that point I didn’t understand this. So for the next several years I practiced with fear by trying to get rid of it. I decided I needed a job that would force me, on a daily basis, to go against the fearful patterns I wanted to eradicate. Having worked as a teacher and a computer programmer, I got a job as a carpenter, which was quite a leap into the unknown. For one thing I weighed only 120 pounds and had no physical skills. I would have to go out every day into a new situation that would stretch my natural limits. The truth is, I did have to go into new and threatening situations every day for a couple of years. Then it gradually got easier.

Again, even though this was a valuable practice in other ways, it didn’t address the root of fear. Instead, I was working with one content after another; I was not working with the “whatness” of fear. Although I was becoming stronger, I was replacing one self (a conditioned fearful self) with another self (a conditioned self that was free from fear but only in a particular situation). This approach is limited because it doesn’t help us dispel the false pictures of who we are.